WESTERN WORLD & THE INDIVIDUAL
|
compensated
compensated global
economies religious
feeling economic
units unique individuals
www seems postmodernism
Back to summary
As Jung points out, one-sidedness is necessary for the conscious mind to adapt to its environment: "This [adaptation] is possibily only by means of an attitude, which as such is necessarily directed and therefore characterized by a certain one-sidedness..." (Jung, 1998: 59) Although this works against nature, it is a condition of consciousness:
The essence of the conscious mind is discrimination; it must, if it is to be aware of things, separate the opposites, and it does this contra naturam. In nature, the opposites seek one another - les extremes se touchent - and so it is in the unconscious, and particularly in the archetype of unity, the self. (ibid, 275)
While the conscious mind adapts, the unconscious compensates. While Christianity was dominant over most of Europe, alchemy simultaneously compensated for its extremes (ibid, 272-3). Both the Christ-image as a symbol of wholeness, that which Christians must emulate, and the numerology of 3 in the Trinity (an uneven number), privilged the masculine principle as the highest (ibid, 273). This principle took the form of the father-son specification. Meanwhile, alchemy provided not the opposite impulse, but a compensation:
Were the unconscious merely complementary, this shift of consciousness would have been accompanied by the production of a mother and daughter, for which the necessary material lay ready to hand in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. But, as alchemy shows, the unconscious chose rather the Cybele-Attis type in the form of the prima materia and the filius macrocosmi, thus proving that it is not complementary, but compensatory. This goes to show that the unconscious does not simply act contrary to the conscious mind, but modifies it more in the manner of an opponent or partner. (ibid, 273)
As well as excluding the feminist principle, Christianity excluded evil: "God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all... If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." (The Bible, 1 John 1:5, 9) The self, however, as "the totality of the psyche altogether, i.e., conscious and unconscious" (Jung, 1998: 237) comprises both good and evil, and at the unconscious level does not distinguish between them. Jung writes, "The pairs of opposites constitute the phenomenology of the paradoxical self, man’s totality" (Jung, 1995: 158) amd again "looked at from the psychological angle he [Christ] corresponds to only one half of the archetype [of the Self]. The other appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect." (Jung, 1998: 300) If God will erase the sin, and the Devil is the source of sin, then all is outside the individual: "If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing." (Jung, 1998: 258). Thus the individual is able to "evade his deepest responsibilities" (ibid), God will erase his sin for him. Again, alchemy offers unconscious compensation: not the opposite principle, evil, but the union of good and evil, one of the aspects of the central mysterium coniunctionis, also called the hieros gamos, sacred wedding, or chymical wedding: the symbolic union of opposites.
In sum, the excessive one-sidedness of the institution, the Christian church, as a conscious organisation, was compensated for by the work of the individual, the alchemist, who strove to retain his link to the numinosum and to the unconscious. As discussed above, this one-sidedness in the conscious mind, for which the unconscious compensates, is necessary to adapt to one’s environs. Problems arise, however, when the environment changes and this adaptation is no longer appropriate. The opposites that have been separated, with one half privileged, need to return to each other for reassessment:
Hence it is essential for progression, which is the successful achievement of adaptation, that impulse and counter-impulse, positive and negative, should reach a state of regular interaction and mutual influence. (ibid, 60)
In an environment where morals and gender roles have changed markedly since the heyday of the Christian church, this particular form of one-sided adaptation has run its course. Anthony Storr writes, "The decline in conventional Christian belief, for example, is related to the fact that the Christ-image, which excludes both evil and the feminine, can no longer symbolize wholeness for the modern man." (Storr, 26) (Unfortunately, Storr himself happily excludes the feminine in his automatic use of the outdated ‘generic’ form "man".) As Schwartz-Salant says, "What was once an unconscious compensation can and indeed must now become a conscious attitude." Postmodernism, as an emerging zeitgeist, an aspect of the collective unconscious emerging and becoming conscious, holds out this possibility.
compensated global economies religious feeling economic units unique individuals www seems postmodernism
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation